SWELL
A design for an expansion microscope, meant to be cheap, that swells chicken muscle so ordinary optics see finer detail.
CONCEPT MODEL · simple shapes, not the engineering CAD · never built
What it is
Make the sample bigger, then look with ordinary lenses
Instead of paying for better glass, SWELL makes the sample itself bigger. A small piece of supermarket chicken breast is anchored inside a gel that swells in water, enlarging the muscle about 4–4.8× (later 10×). A small 3D-printed microscope then scans the swollen gel, tile by tile.
01
Anchor and swell
The muscle's proteins are tied into the gel. The tissue is loosened, then the gel swells in water and pulls the proteins apart, ideally by the same amount in every direction.
02
Image
A printed stage moves the gel over a modest objective lens and a black-and-white camera. Hundreds of photos are stitched into one image of the whole gel.
03
Check with the muscle's own stripes
Muscle is striped at a regular spacing, about 1.69 µm in chicken breast. Measuring the same stripes before and after swelling would show how much each fibre grew, and a map of that would show whether the gel swelled evenly.
The goal: put chicken in, refill the chemicals, press one button, and get images, a quality report and a draft paper that claims no more than the report supports.
What isn't known yet
- It has never been built. Nothing has been bought or run on a bench. The mechanical design, the lab protocol and the instrument software aren't written yet.
- Every result is a simulation, on computer-made gels, and some checks fail. Whether a muscle fibre grows by the same amount as the gel around it is untested.
- Free to take, but not free of patents. X-WOW claims nothing, but expansion microscopy itself is patented by others (patent notes).
Try it today
What you can do now, without building anything
Measure chicken with a laser
A family experiment, age guide 8 and up: an adult shines a Class 2 red laser pointer through a thin strip of chicken, and you work out the spacing of its stripes from the spots it makes.
Run the ruler software
swell-ruler measures how much each muscle fibre grew, from a pair of before-and-after images. Tested on computer-made gels only; its results are on its page.
Read the full technical record
The science, every simulation result (failures included), every claim and its status, the full parts list, and the lab safety tables.
Cost
Estimated cost, and the target
On these estimates, both are above target. They are not quotes: only 3 of the 31 parts have a price read from a supplier so far, and the rest are earlier figures from the design notes. Shipping, tools and labour aren't included. The full parts list is in the technical record.
Safety
The chemistry is for equipped labs only, never for home
Several of the gel chemicals can cause cancer or genetic damage, or harm fertility. That work belongs only in a laboratory with a fume hood, working under its own safety rules. The only parts of SWELL to try at home are the laser experiment (age guide 8 and up) and the microscope steps of the evidence ladder (10 and up), always with an adult: the adult holds and aims the Class 2 red laser, never at anyone's eyes, and handles the knife, the raw chicken, the glass and the blender. Every hazard, its control and the safety data sheets are in the technical record; X-WOW's general limits are on the safety page.
Download
Everything in one file
Design notes, simulations, data, the ruler software and the safety notes in one free zip (3.9 MB), with no sign-up.
Download swell-g0-2026-10-12.zip What's inside, checksums and licences